Music of Words and Words in Music: The Sound of Gravità in the Italian Madrigal

I would like to introduce the topic of this essay with a somewhat counterintuitive question: Is language like music? What may appear counterintuitive is the order in which the terms of the comparison are introduced. So formulated, the question suggests the possibility of a musical theory of language based on the idea that music provides a modeling framework to analyze and describe salient properties of language. For decades, especially after the linguistic turn in the humanities, scholars have often asked the opposite question: Is music like language? In an attempt to unlock the enigma of musical signification, we have turned to semiotics and linguistics, looking for structural similarities between language and music while probing the sound interface between structure and meaning. It is natural for us to accept the idea that music must function like language, that sound structures should be reducible to a musical syntax reflecting deep-seated correspondences between language and music. My intention here is not to praise or refute the claims of this linguistic model, a model that to some extent had an important precedent in the classical tradition that linked music to rhetoric. More simply, I would like to draw attention to what is by now a less familiar way of thinking about language, one that assumes that on some level language in general, and poetry in particular, relies on musical procedures to communicate information. This is an important dimension of Renaissance theories of language, starting of course with Pietro Bembo. It was a view of language that was less concerned with establishing syntactical parallels between music and language and more interested in exploring and exploiting the role that sound effects play in the construction of meaning. It was the aural dimension of language, its ability to reinforce meaning and engender emotional pleasure through the sense of hearing, that provided the impetus